“High Performance Web Sites” A Review
Title High Performance Web Sites
Author Steve Sounders
ISBN-10 0-596-52930-9 (ISBN-13 978-0-596-52930-7)
Pages 146 (including index)
High Performance Web Sites by Steve Saunders is an attempt at teaching people how to best go about optimizing their web sites. No I do not mean optimizing for search engines, I mean optimizing for the best user experience (and believe me it is a relief to have a book aimed at giving the user a better experience rather than the search engines).
The book is split into 15 different chapters. All chapters bar chapter 15 are all based around a rule that will help optimize your web site. Most of the topics covered are based upon how to lower loading times so that a user has the best experience on your web site (with the exception of a couple). Some of these rules range from the obvious such as ensuring you use GZIP compression as and when needed through to the ones you may not think about such as increasing your DNS TTL (time to live) values.
Most of the rules are very self explanatory and are presented in quite a good manor. Although some of the rules are in fact obvious and should not need explaining it is sometimes best to be reminded of such things. Other rules (such as the TTL rule previously mentioned) are not so obvious and (even for the most seasoned web developer) easily overlooked.
Steve Sounders has gathered his knowledge (as is evident in the book) from his extensive knowledge and work in Yahoo and their optimizing endeavors. The book works hand in hand with their Y-Slow addon for the Firebug firefox extension. As well as the Y-Slow addon the book also suggests a few other useful tools (including ones for Internet Explorer) that can come in handy.
All throughout the book Steve uses a list of top 10 websites as case studies and demonstrates those that follow the rule in question as well as sometimes showing how they can improve. As previously mentioned rule 5 is not a rule in itself but is actually a chapter dedicated at deconstructing the top 10 sites used throughout the book. It is good to see some constructive criticism on them and to see how they could improve which this chapter achieves to perfection.
The book as a whole is a very good read and I highly recommend it to anyone who deals with websites regardless of whether as a hobby or in a professional manner.
Tags: high performance websites, optimization, steve sounders, user experience, yahoo